the stove, and the dinner, too! Before long, he looked as if he had the entire contents of a kender’s bedtable drawer clutched in his hands.
Suddenly, out of the commodore’s pocket apparatus sprang a thirty-foot ladder with rubber safety pads on the feet to keep it from slipping. Conundrum nearly fell over in surprise, which would have been disastrous, as he would likely have been skinned, filed, polished, trimmed, julienned, and uncorked all at the same time.
“Good show!” Sir Grumdish shouted. “Now climb up here and cut us down.”
“Um…” Conundrum hesitated, still flipping through tools.
“What is it?” Doctor Bothy hissed. “Hurry, before the troll comes back!”
“Um, there doesn’t seem to be… um, a knife,” Conundrum said as he looked up in dismay. Then he spun round, for something was coming through the woods toward them.
Razmous Pinchpocket ran for his life, as only a kender can run when a troll is hot on his heels. He could almost feel its hot, reeking breath on his neck as his topknot cracked like a flag in the wind of his speed. The dark forest flashed by, and he dodged, dipped, ducked, and leaped like a whirling dervish, avoiding low-hanging branches that would have brained him, groping roots that would have tripped him, and looming trunks that would have pulverized him had he run into them head on.
And he wouldn’t have had it any other way.
There is nothing that makes a kender feel quite so alive as the hot breath of doom blowing down his shorts. Perhaps it is the nearness of death that makes the creatures so enjoy life, like the condemned prisoner who treasures every moment, every glimmer of the sun off the spider-webs in his cell, the taste of the earth in the stale bread and rank water that is his last meal. The kender race is without fear, a trait that gives them their power and indeed their very nature, their spirit, their reason for living, and at the same time usually leads to their demise. For it is lack of fear that makes them such intrepid travelers, and it is lack of fear that provides the only real check on their population. The kender are too peaceful and good-natured to involve themselves in war, too clever with their hands in other peoples pockets to ever starve, and too mobile to be threatened by plague. The normal limiting factors that keep most civilizations from destroying themselves utterly or so theorize the gnomes of the Philosophers” Guild, are completely absent from the kender race because of their very nature. So the gods made them fearless, to keep them from ruling the world.
But Razmous wasn’t thinking of all this as he fled from the troll. He was thinking of his leap. He must time the leap perfectly, or else end up on top of an angry troll at the bottom of a very deep, sword-lined hole.
Of course, it had come to him as he sat in the briars looking at the troll stalking round his dangling friends, that the badgers and hedgehogs had built their trap to catch trolls, among other things. Nothing else could explain the trap’s gargantuan scale, its huge stones, and wide, deep, sword-lined pit. And he thought, if I can get the troll to chase me to the pit, maybe I can get him to fall into it, too. Of course, there is always the danger that the limb will break, or that I will miss it in the dark, or that I won’t be able to leap the hole…
Really, he reminded himself, he had been around gnomes for far too long. He was almost beginning to think like a gnome, more concerned with a thousand possibilities and designing against what might go wrong than concentrating on making it go right-or at least trying to make it go right. The trying was the important part, he reminded himself, as he slapped aside a sapling and hurtled a fallen log. After this voyage, he planned to find some kender and go on a real adventure for a change.
Then he saw it, or thought he saw it. He saw something that certainly looked like it-a darker spot against the near-blackness of the forest floor, and a tree looming over it. The troll was almost on his heels, and there were twenty yards to go, twenty open yards in which the troll’s longer legs could gain the advantage. Razmous wondered if he would soon feel the troll’s hot breath upon his neck, like in the stories told by bards. Ten yards now, and he felt something tug briefly at his topknot. It might have been the troll clutching at the rippling pennant of hair streaming out behind the kender, or it might have been only a bit of underbrush becoming momentarily entangled in his topknot. In any case, it gave Razmous the brief surge of encouragement-he liked to call it-to cover the last few yards and leap for the tree’s overhanging limb.
He caught it, swung up almost vertical, and reversed his grip like a trapeze artist so that on the down swing he’d be facing the way he had come. He swung down to find the troll teetering on the edge of the trap, its long arms swinging wildly, trying to maintain its balance. Seeing the kender within easy reach, it shot out one clawed hand and grabbed him by the legs, and this, oddly enough, proved its downfall.
Razmous, caught in the troll’s deadly grasp, tried to pull free, which was just enough to overbalance the troll and drag it into the pit. Of course, now Razmous was dangling from a tree limb, and the troll was dangling from him. The kender cried out in agony as he felt his arms being wrenched from their sockets, while the troll’s cruel nails dug into the flesh of his legs. The troll thrashed and kicked, trying to find some purchase with its long black toes against the sides of the trap’s stony walls, and it roared in fury and fear. Only by the most heroic effort did Razmous manage to hang onto the tree limb as long as he did.
He felt his fingers slipping, slipping… the skin of his palms tearing against the cruel bark of the tree…
But it wasn’t his skin or even his joints that gave way first. It was his breeches. Worn to a frazzle from sliding down chutes and crawling through stone cracks and bramble patches, the last few threads now tore with a small ripping noise. The troll seemed to hang in the air a moment, staring in amazement at the sun-bleached yellow rags clutched in its fist, before it vanishing with a cry down the hole-a cry that, seconds later, was suddenly cut short.
Razmous looked down the hole and heaved a pained sigh before pulling himself up into the tree. He sat balanced on the tree limb for a moment, contemplating his next move. The sea breeze felt cool as it stirred the fine downy hair covering his much-paler legs.
“It’s a good thing this is the balmy north,” he groaned as he scrambled to his feet on the branch and teetered there like a high-wire artist that he had seen in Palanthas once, “and there are no ladies about.”
Conundrum faced the creature thrashing through the woods toward them, the ball of convenient tools clutched protectively before him. He hoped it would make him look more dangerous somehow.
“It’s only me!” said a high, thin voice from the deep shadows beneath the trees.
“Razmous?” Conundrum asked.
“I see him!” Doctor Bothy said from his vantage point dangling high up in the tree. “I see his topknot!”
“Razmous, come help me!” Conundrum shouted. “There isn’t a knife in Commodore Brigg’s wonderful all- purpose knife.”
“First I have to put some pants on,” Razmous answered.
“What’s happened to your pants?” Conundrum asked.
“More importantly, what happened to the troll?” Sir Grumdish demanded.
“Both fell in the trap,” Razmous said as he stepped into the clearing, a large sheet of rotting bark held modestly before him. With every step, it rotted and crumbled just a little more.
Conundrum explained the trap to his companions while Razmous crossed the clearing and retrieved his pouches. From them, he pulled a freshly-washed pair of homespun trousers and a new set of bright yellow leggings. Behind the screen of the vines, he slipped them on, then settled his pouches over his shoulders and around his waist. When he returned to the clearing, he felt like a new kender.
“That’s better,” he announced.
“Do you always carry an extra set of clothes in your pouches?” Sir Grumdish said from the treetops. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a knife or a dagger or anything actually useful for our current situation?”
Presently, Razmous produced one of Doctor Bothy’s scalpels-one that had been missing for some weeks.
“It’s a good thing for you that I found it!” the kender chirped as he sawed at the doctor’s ropes.
But even with the ladder and the scalpel, there was little to prevent them from falling on their heads and breaking their necks once cut free. So cleverly had they been trussed that the cutting of a single strand would unravel the whole bunch and send them both plummeting headfirst to the ground. Conundrum managed to scrape together a smallish pile of dead leaves to cushion their fall somewhat, while Razmous advised them to try to fall as softly as possible.
“How, pray tell, shall I do that?” Sir Grumdish snarled as he watched the sharp blade slice into the final bit of rope from which he dangled.
